musical musings from the frozen north:
torontopia, mont royal city and kawartha kottages

Friday, December 19, 2014

Willie Thrasher

Willie
Thrasher is an Inuit singer/songwriter featured on the essential new
compilation—and ideal last-minute gift for the music-lover on your xmas
list—Native North America, which I reviewed here. (I also interviewed curator
Kevin Howes for Maclean’shere.) His is a common story: raised in the wild,
sent to a residential school where he was forbidden to speak or sing in his
native tongue, immersed in Western culture, and started to reclaim his heritage
in his 20s—which, in Thrasher’s case, he did with rock’n’roll. He does, after
all, have the perfect name for such a calling. He recorded one album in 1980,
but he still performs today: he’s a licensed busker in Nanaimo, B.C. As he says
below, “the wolves are still howling.”

I used only
a bit of this interview in the short piece I wrote for the print edition of
Maclean’s. What follows is an edited transcript of my favourite interview of the past
12 months.

Willie Thrasher

On the phone from his home in
Nanaimo, B.C.

November 10, 2014

Where did you grow up?

I was born
in Aklavik. My dad was a captain of a whale boat, a schooner. We never stayed
in town, my parents wanted to stay out in the wilderness. I would go out and
all I would hear would be wolves. I would chase ptarmigans. I loved wildlife. I
saw black bear, caribou, moose. It was so, so beautiful. Until I was about
five, my spirit was with the wilderness. When I turned five, my dad took the
boat to Aklavik to the Immaculate Conception Missionary School. I went there
holding my mom’s hands. She took me right to the school where I saw a big, big
nun. She yelled out, “Hi Mrs. Thrasher! Is this your son, William?” And they
hugged each other. “We’ll take care of him!” As soon as my mom went outside,
the nun turned really slowly to me, grabbed my hand, took me right to the boys’
side, cut my hair right off, and then every time I spoke my language I got
slapped in the face or had soap put in my mouth. I was told never to speak
Inuktitut. Never to sing or dance. That’s when my spirit was taken away
forever. I never forgot the day that happened.

Did you see your
parents again?

I was
allowed to go home two months in the summer. I stayed there from 1953 to 1958,
then from there I went to in Grollier Hall in Inuvik, which was a huge
residential school built by the government and run by the Roman Catholic
Church. One day I went to the gym because I was tired of everybody and there
was a set of drums there. Then I started doing this three, four times a week,
and I started becoming really good. Then one day the Hard Day’s Night movie came on.

At the school?

They were
showing it at the theatre. Ringo was my favourite at the time. I concentrated
on how Ringo was playing, and that was the turning point in my life. There were
a couple of guitar players around, and we became the first Inuit rock’n’roll
band in history, the Cordells. We started playing in different communities. Who
knew that a bunch of Inuit who used to hunt caribou and live off the land could
play rock’n’roll? It was so cool.

How did the amps and
guitars get up there? Forgive my ignorance, but what was electricity like?

Amplifiers
were sent from Edmonton, Calgary. Electricity was like it is today. It was a
big school, about 2,000 students. It was pretty civilized: fridge, stoves, TVs,
everything. When the Cordells started playing, we were one of the hottest bands
in the Northwest Territories.

How would you get to
gigs?

We used to
fly from community to community. We’d play dances and make $100, which was a
lot then.

How much was the
plane, though? You couldn’t have been making much profit.

Oh, $15.
But sometimes the pilot, Freddy Carmichael, would just give it to us for a
certain percentage. Or people who ran the dance would pay for it. This went on
for a while. Our band was really good. We’d practice on weekends and people
would listen to us.

What songs were you
playing?

Rolling
Stones, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” “Hard Day’s Night.” “Pipeline.” “Have
You Ever Seen the Rain.” The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” [he sings it]. “19th
Nervous Breakdown.” “As Tears Go By.” “House of the Rising Sun.” And that song
by the Kinks, you know, [sings riff] “All Day and All of the Night.” “Gloria.”
We were really good.

When did you start
writing your own songs?

One night
we were playing a New Year’s dance and this old man came walking right up to us
and sat down and said, “Why don’t you guys write Inuit folk music about your
culture? About your ways?” He started telling us how the missionaries took our
ways away. We weren’t allowed to think, talk, hunt, dance or anything. This old
man who came that night—we never seen him again after. He told us who we were.
That night I couldn’t sleep. From that moment on, I was determined to be a
songwriter. I only had Grade 6 at the time, so I wasn’t that good of a writer.
But people loved it. What touched me the most was that it brought back my
spirit: who I was. I remembered stories my mom and dad and grandfather taught
me, and I thought, “I want to write music that way.”

When were you first
approached about this project?

My other
half was looking at email and she saw Kevin Howes trying to get in touch with
me somehow. So this was meant to happen. Kevin was working on this for years.
All of us [musicians] from the past had no idea. We thought these albums were
long gone and forgotten. But Kevin Howes put a fire in 23 performers to bring
them all back to life again. Everyone is getting so excited.

Did you have copies of
your old recordings?

Kevin Howes
sent me one about a month ago, of [the 1980 album] Spirit Child. It brought a lot of memories. I had long, long hair
and was living in Ottawa at the time, and Montreal. I had a call from CBC; they
said, “Willie, are you interested in doing an album?” I was honoured to
represent the Inuit and the Northwest Territories.

I knew the CBC
recorded a lot of indigenous artists at the time—as well as all sorts of
musicians from across the country—but did you have to apply for something? Did
they pick you out of the blue?

I was the
first Inuit to travel across Canada maybe 23 times in 12 years, or something like
that. I’d go from Montreal to Vancouver, playing in community after community,
then I’d go up to Whitehorse, then from there to Alaska, then back to Vancouver
then Calgary then Winnipeg then Toronto and then 39 states. I think it’s
because my dad was a traveller; he travelled for 21 years, eh? Once I started
travelling I couldn’t stop: couldn’t stop singing, couldn’t stop learning. I
met Pete Seeger in New York. I played with Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte-Marie
at colleges. I had a feeling at that time it would be my life. Even to this
day, I’m still playing. I just came back from the waterfront, where I was
playing.

How much travelling do
you do now?

Sometimes
Vancouver, sometimes around Vancouver Island. But I expect things will pick up
again after this record comes out. I’d like to play across Canada the States
and overseas.We’re not sure what’s
going to happen, but we’re getting ready for anything.

So you spend the 1970s
travelling and you end up in Ottawa and you make this record. What happens
between then and now? Do you continue to perform and write?

For me,
music will be with me forever. There is so much to learn. When Kevin Howes
brought all that back, it gave me encouragement to carry on. Then I started
hearing from Willy Mitchell and other performers I hadn’t heard from in a long
time. We write emails to each other. I see that they’re still rocking, still
performing.

You probably hadn’t
seen some of them since the Sweet Grass Festival in Val d’Or, Que., in 1980.

Exactly.
And some passed away. Willie Dunn passed away a couple of weeks after he was
interviewed for this project. Morley Loon passed away.

You and Morley Loon
had a band together in the 1980s, called Red Cedar.

Yes, in
Vancouver. I was mostly a person who loved to get people dancing and singing
and bringing them together. But Red Cedar had a different idea. They were more
into protesting and cutting people down. It was a band doing heavy protest
songs. I wanted to make music that helped people understand that we should all
be working together. I told Red Cedar, “If you guys do one more song like that,
I’ll walk out.” They did; I walked out and never went back. I was on my own
after that.

Do you think the time
period captured on this compilation was a particularly special period?

This is a
very historical thing that never happened before in Canadian history. This was
when rock’n’roll, all these young rockers, were nailing everybody with
beautiful songs and hippies were dancing all over the place. We were there. We
sang those songs. We tried to promote our own songs. We weren’t financed or
pushed like the others were. The only people who seemed to buy it at the time were
the Aboriginal people. But we kept going. The albums faded away.

Do you see a similar
spirit in younger Aboriginal artists today? Even if that spirit manifests
itself in music that sounds very different from what you were doing?

Well, I
never thought I’d see Indian and Inuit kids doing rap. It’s good. I see music
getting better and promoted better than it ever was in my life. It’s changed
dramatically. Once someone gets well known, they’ll be on APTN, CBC, on radio
stations. Back then, it was really hard. It was very difficult to travel, to
pay our own way, to make our own albums, to find an agent. Now it’s opened up a
lot more; there is a lot of light on Aboriginal folk, rock and rap music, all
because how we in the past opened the doors. There are thousands of Native
people who heard about us and want to know about us. Young Native musicians try
to follow our footsteps. Sometimes I hear someone singing my song, and they
say, “Oh, you’re the one who wrote it, eh? Can you play it for me?”

It touches
my heart very much. It brings back so much loneliness and happiness, memories
of where I was at the time, being wild, all the drummers and dancers and
singers I saw when I was young, at powwows and Native festivals. Who is Willie
Thrasher today? Willie Thrasher is an Inuit songwriter who doesn’t sing for
himself, he sings for all people, try to make them dance, try to make them
understand where we came from. That was my journey. It still is my journey, and
I have a long ways to go yet. And if it wasn’t for Kevin Howes and Light in the
Attic [Records], the fire wouldn’t have started. Now the wolves are howling.